CASE STUDY: Cox and Kings India

COX AND KINGS INDIAMULTINATIONAL TRAVEL COMPANY IMPROVES APPLICATION PERFORMANCE WITH RIVERBED STEELHEAD

Travel

• Slowresponsetimesforusersaccessing legacyapplications

• Significantexpensesduetofrequentbandwidthupgrades

• Declineinendusers’productivity

• RiverbedSteelheadappliances

• RiverbedSteelheadCentralManagementConsole

• RiverbedSteelheadMobileControllerand40Steelheadmobilesoftwareclient

• Increasedbandwidthcapacitybyabout7.5times

• Totaldatareductionofabout89%withinamonth,withpeakreductionsof98%

• Easyaccesstobusinessapplications

• Enhanceduserproductivity

IN BRIEF

Industry

Solution

Benefits

Challenges

CHALLENGE: Founded in 1758, Cox & Kings is the longest established travel company in the world. With headquarters in Mumbai, it has 12 fully-owned offices in India, and, as an internationally operating travel company, works collaboratively with international and associate offices around the world.

The company is well connected through its Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Network (VPN) across all its global locations with redundant last mile circuits and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE).

Despite the firm’s investment in network infrastructure, users faced slow response times while accessing business-critical applications such as SAP from their branch offices and other applications such as email from their laptops. This affected performance and business results. The company had legacy applications with significant payload on WAN bandwidth driving a need for frequent bandwidth upgrades. The company had incurred significant expenses on frequent bandwidth upgrades both at WAN and last mile levels.

The IT department at Cox and Kings needed to improve performance of their legacy business applications and improve end-user experience. The team looked to WAN optimization and acceleration to protect the firm’s investments in its MPLS VPN, both in terms of capacity and performance.

SOLUTION: The IT department at Cox and Kings identified the existing infrastructure problems and initially considered solutions from Citrix and Riverbed, using the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers as an initial reference followed by an in-depth proof-of-concept deployment on Cox and Kings premises. The company benchmarked performance using its MAPI, HTTP, Microsoft SQL server, CIFS and FTP services. After conducting the proof-of concept over four weeks, the company found that the performance of Riverbed Steelhead appliances best met its requirements.

Cox and Kings deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its 12 domestic locations and 6 international locations (out of 8 international locations) and installed Steelhead Mobile software on 40 user devices. “Implementation was initiated in October 2011 and completed in a parallel fashion across all domestic office locations over a four-week timeline. International offices were completed in a phased manner with rollout timelines of enterprise applications like SAP being the key driver for enablement,” explains Ravindra Pawar, Head- Enterprise Networks, Cox and Kings.

Cox and Kings also installed the Riverbed Central Management Console to monitor the health and performance of Steelhead appliances and simplify the ongoing configuration and management of distributed appliances. The firm also deployed Riverbed Steelhead Mobile Controller to facilitate optimization and improve user experiences for its 40 mobile employees.

CASE STUDY: Cox and Kings India

BENEFITS:

ABOUT RIVERBED

SUMMARY

The Riverbed Steelhead solution has improved performance for Cox and Kings’ business applications delivered over the existing MPLS WAN.“ Users can now easily access these business applications as they are responding faster than before. This has enhanced users’ productivity and boosted the company’s business growth,” says Ravindra Pawar.

Since completing the deployment in November 2011, the company has not felt the need to upgrade the MPLS VPN bandwidth. Riverbed optimizations have increased bandwidth capacity by about 7.5 times. The current bandwidth is now able to accommodate sharp surges during peak business seasons. With Riverbed, the company has reduced total data traveling over the network by about 89% within a month, with peaks at 98%. Riverbed Steelhead accomplishes this order-of-magnitude improvement with a set of innovations that are unique in the market

and explain why Steelhead has been the #1 WAN Optimization solution for seven years running in delivering applications and data at the fastest speeds across the optimal networks at the lowest cost.

These innovations include data de-duplication (transfer of redundant data across the WAN is now eliminated), data compression (relies on data patterns that can be represented more efficiently), latency optimization (clients’ requests are answered locally instead of being forwarded to the remote server), caching/proxy (storing data in local caches), better protocol management (bundles multiple requests from chatty applications into one), and WAN traffic shaping (controls data flow for specific legacy applications).

Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization.

Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com

Cox and Kings wanted to improve performance of their legacy business application, improve end user experience, WAN optimization and acceleration, and most importantly protect its investments in an MPLS VPN. The IT department at Cox and Kings decided to deploy Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile software, managed by the Riverbed Steelhead Central Management Console and Steelhead Mobile Controller. The Riverbed solutions have delivered numerous benefits such as increased bandwidth capacity by about 7.5 times, easy access to business applications and enhanced user productivity. The company is now keen to explore Riverbed Performance Management solutions to improve visibility into its IT infrastructure.

“Users can now easily access these business applications as they are responding faster than before. This has enhanced users’ productivity and boosted the company’s business growth.”

Ravindra Pawar, Head-Enterprise Networks, Cox and Kings

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